Brister had very good things to say about Winchester's old Lubaloy and the patterns it produced. However, in addition to plating, those loads were also buffered.
Re Dr. Jones' work, I'd have more confidence in it if he hadn't made such a point about the frequency at which targets are broken by a single pellet. I don't know that there's any way to count how many single pellet hits result in breaks, but I do know of a way to prove that single pellet hits quite frequently do NOT break targets. You and I agree except for "frequently.". No one has published data on the frequency of single pellet hits and misses. It is a simple enough test to perform, but will take considerable time and effort. One only needs to count "single pellet hits" (target broken in half to three or four pieces) out of so many shots and immediately collect any missed targets and examine for pellet hits. The target landing zone must be clear of broken targets. This would predict the probability of a single pellet hit resulting in a break. The error would be miscount on breaks ands targets breaking on landing.
That's simply to look for unbroken targets on the field and see how many have one hole in them. Not at all hard to find. Sometimes even 2 holes. Clearly not every single pellet hit results in a break. Unfortunately, that is not very useful information.
Makes me wonder whether there might also be a hole in his conclusions. The issue of hits needed to break a target stemmed from the diameter of patterns with various numbers of pellets. No reason I can see to question the rest of his work.
DDA
Don, when someone comes up with a conclusion based on "statistics" that can be thrown into doubt by the simple collection of real, actual physical evidence--things we can look at and touch--then yes, I definitely do think the rest of his work is open to question. Your background is engineering. Mine is assessing source reliability, as an intelligence analyst. What the one pellet thing tells me is that Dr. Jones is spending too much time in his laboratory and in front of his computer, and not enough time doing the very basic and simple "evidence collection" one can do on a target range.
And you're operating on the assumption that a target broken in half or into just 3 or 4 pieces is a single pellet break. How do you KNOW that?
